A short note on the risks of spending too much time entertained by brightly coloured figures moving about on one's hand-held device whilst riding a bicycle.

The market's five-week long fixation on headlines emanating from Brussels, Frankfurt, Madrid, Rome or Washington came to an end on Wednesday with the sudden realization that it had managed, in its rapture, to blindly pedal from the credit crisis fairground on to the economy autobahn. The result is obvious on the left.

The industry-stacked Dax underperformed the bank-heavy Ibex 35 by about 3.2 percent over the course of the mayhem.

Of course, this may all be an irrelevant sideshow, what with a certain palpable sense of panic in the air with respect to Monday morning.

Will France retain its AAA?

Will JP Morgan be downgraded?

Here's a snip from Pragmatic Capitalism:

...In a comment Friday Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners stopped in to provide his perspective of the downgrade. He said:

“I suspect you are all missing the bigger picture. The downgrade of US sovereign is NOT irrelevant because it will force S&P to (a) downgrade JP Morgan (as the sovereign stands behind the banking system, you cannot have a bank rated higher than the sovereign), and (b) downgrade several European sovereigns, most notably France. Once France get downgraded, several French banks will get downgraded. It will then spread to other countries, and we have the potential for another crisis, so don’t underestimate the significance of this.”